Dewsbury to Damascus: The danger of young British Muslims learning to wage Jihad in Syria

All it takes is a cheap air ticket to Turkey, and then a ride over the border into northern Syria.

That is the route being taken by British-based jihadists from London
and the Midlands, who are making their presence felt in the fight
against Assad.

The week before last, two British and Dutch
photojournalists had a narrow escape when they were taken prisoner by 30
such people. Note that in the eyes of the British jihadis, it is westerners who are the real enemy, westerners who were rescued by the Syrian opposition.

Rescuers: Syrian rebels freed photojournalists John Cantlie and Jeroen Oerlemans when they were captured by jihadists

I write British-based jihadists because these young males feel no
loyalty whatsoever to this country, and for that matter don’t care about
Syria either. As Bangladeshis, Chechens and Pakistanis, they don’t even
speak Syrian Arabic and know nothing of the delicate politics of that
country.

Their true loyalty is to the global Muslim umma – the
community of believers – which transcends any single country. This
enables them to romanticize their small selves, otherwise confined as
they are to life above a chip shop or curry house in the Midlands. They
don’t have any loyalty to this country either, and could just as easily
be crying ‘Allahu Akhbar’ amidst the embers of Birmingham, should it
come to it. Although they are militarily incompetent, that can quickly
be rectified in camps in Syria, where improvised bombs are the weapon of
choice for the rebels against Assad’s armour.

And what does the British government do about it? It is ‘not keen on
British subjects going there’ we are told. This is not just
irresponsible, it is criminally negligent. The government could not even
put up a spokesman on the Today programme this morning to explain what it plans to do about this scandal.

Instead, we had Noman Benotman, a reformed Libyan jihadist from the
shoestring Quilliam Foundation, learnedly explaining why these British
subjects are acting as mercenaries in a conflict that does not involve
us at all. They are disciples, he said, of Sayyid Qutb, the ‘thinker’
who inspired Al Qaeda, a sort of Egyptian Lenin, for his ‘religion’ is
really a political ideology They don’t care, he explained, about
‘nationality’. How very fascinating. Actually, those insights have been
available to anyone who has even casually studied this problem since
9/11 if not before.

The UK, he explained, is one of the big supporters of the revolutions
in the Arab world. We should therefore get behind a process whose main
regional winner seems to be the Muslim Brotherhood. After all, avers
Hague, these are just the Muslim equivalent of 1950s European Christian
Democrats. If you are skeptical about the rebels, you must be supportive
of Assad’s tyranny. Subtle these people are not. In fact, in the real
world they can all include baddies, something only shouty juvenile neo
cons and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, eager for a war they will not fight
themselves, find hard to grasp.

Meanwhile, in the real world, there are ominous signs that sectarian
conflict is reviving in neighboring Lebanon, where the Sunnis and Shias
are split in their support for the rebels and Assad. There have been
tit-for-tat kidnappings, and the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia have urged
their nationals to leave. There are also some 160,000 refugees from
Syria, who are upsetting the delicate political balance inside Jordan.
Things are not looking good in Turkey either, which does not want
another semi-autonomous Kurdish state inside northern Syria, which will
be magnetically drawn to the similar set up inside northern Iraq.

Instead of giving the Syrian rebels body armour and comms equipment,
thereby escalating the fighting, the British government (as part of the
international community) should be searching for a way to bring about a
ceasefire inside Syria, up to and including a solution which enables
antagonistic ethno-religious groups to live in statelets of their own.
There is no reason why the botched up colonial state that is Syria
should survive at all, except in some loose federal form, particularly
if the Assad family relinquishes power.

Since we are so prominent in backing the Syrian rebels, surely the
government can pressure the Free Syrian Army to expel these British
jihadists tout suite? Surely the comms eequipment and body armour gives
us some leverage? The government should also immediately remove the
passports of anyone who has fought in Syria, for surely our £2 billion a
year intelligence services are capable of establishing their
identities? If they can’t, then what are we paying them for, since these
returning jihadists are surely a major security threat to this country?

It would also be good, once in a while, to know that our
government is concerned about the interests of this country and the
people who live in it, rather than allowing the likes of Noman Benotman
to set the agenda. If it doesn't, then we in that part of the press that
does not cravenly idealise such lightweight figures as Hague will have
to probe more deeply and persistently as to why this is the case.